Prospecting in Connect
Prospecting turns a description of who you want to reach into researched organisations, evidence-backed claims about them, and — where a real address exists — one first message. Ten stages run in order and each can stop the next. No address is ever guessed. A claim with nothing behind it never reaches the prospect record, which is why the list is shorter than a scraper's and survives being read six months later.
The ten stages#
Prospecting is not one action. It is a chain, and knowing which link you are standing on is most of what you need to read a prospect's screen. Each stage has its own page in this section.
- Discovery criteria — the brief describing who is worth reaching.
- Candidate collection — organisations that match the shape, before anyone judges them.
- Public-source research — reading what is published about each one.
- Evidence capture — attaching the source to every claim made.
- Qualification and scoring — turning evidence into a judgement about fit.
- Contactability — whether a real, sourced address exists to write to.
- Compliance check — do-not-contact, suppression, unsubscribe, prior contact.
- First outreach — the one message, sent or held under the channel's autonomy rule.
- Reply classification — what the answer means and what it stops.
- Opportunity or stop — a deal on the pipeline, or a clean end.
The order matters because each stage is allowed to end the chain. A candidate that fails qualification is not researched further. A qualified prospect with no sourced address never reaches outreach, and is kept rather than deleted. A prospect who says stop is stopped at the reply, not at the next scheduled send.
The rule the section rests on#
Connect does not guess email addresses. There is no pattern generator, no first.last@ construction, no verification service asked to grade a made-up string. An address is either found in a public source with that source recorded, or the prospect has no address and is handled as one that cannot be written to yet.
This costs volume, deliberately. A workspace running the same brief through a tool that invents addresses will have a longer list. That list contains bounces, spam-trap hits and messages to people who never held the address, and the damage lands on the sending mailbox rather than on the tool. Connect does not guess email addresses is the full argument.
Where the research budget goes#
Research costs money on every candidate, so the spend is routed rather than spread. A deeper pass runs where it can change a decision — a candidate sitting near the qualification line, or one whose contactability is the only unknown — and does not run on a candidate already clearly in or clearly out. Re-research is governed by freshness rather than by a calendar: a record is refreshed when its age makes a claim doubtful, not because a week has passed.
Before any of that, identity resolution asks whether this organisation is already a relationship. Prospecting an existing customer is the failure that costs the most, because the person on the other end reads it as proof that nobody in your business knows who they are. A candidate that resolves to an existing person or company is dropped from the cold list and surfaces as the relationship it already is.
The numbers above the list, and why they were wrong#
The counts above the prospect list — organisations discovered, contactable, qualified, already contacted, ready to send — were once derived from the newest 500 contacts and the newest 500 discovered organisations. Every headline number was a fact about a slice, presented as a fact about the workspace.
| Headline | Reported | Actual |
|---|---|---|
| Organisations discovered | 500 | 530 |
| Already contacted | 0 | 40 |
The zero is the instructive one. The forty already-contacted contacts were the oldest, so they fell outside the newest-500 window entirely and the screen said nobody had been contacted at all. Contacts are counted in batches now, with each batch's research fetched in one query, and organisations are counted by the database rather than in Python over a slice. The numbers above the list covers what each one now means.
How to read this section#
- Setting up a search
- Describing who you want to reach, then Location and scope.
- Understanding a prospect on screen
- Evidence on a prospect, Why this prospect, The prospect record.
- Getting to a message
- Contactability, Sender readiness, First outreach.
- When something stops
- Stopping a cold sequence and the section under Troubleshooting.
- Bringing your own list
- Uploading your own list, which skips discovery and joins the chain at research.
Everything in this section#
27 pages, each with its own status and the date it was last checked against the running system.
| Page | What it covers |
|---|---|
| A prospect replies | What happens when a prospect answers: how the reply is classified, what it changes about the record, and which answers end the cold path immediately. |
| Collecting candidates | The stage between a search and a researched prospect: where a candidate comes from, what is stored about it, and what is deliberately left undecided. |
| Connect does not guess email addresses | Connect never constructs a prospect's email contact from a name and a domain. What that rule costs, what it buys, and what happens to a prospect without one. |
| Contactability | The gap between a business you can research and one you can write to, why the two counts differ, and what to do with the difference. |
| Deep research on a prospect | The second, deeper pass over a prospect: what it adds, what it consumes, and the rule that decides which candidates are worth it. |
| Describing who you want to reach | What a discovery brief holds, which parts become hard filters and which only steer research, and how to write one that returns real work. |
| Discovery running in the background | Discovery that runs on a schedule rather than on a button: what it does between visits, what it consumes, and how you see progress. |
| Evidence for a contact address | How a prospect's address earns its place: where it was found, how that origin is stored, and what makes one address usable and another not. |
| Evidence on a prospect | Why every claim on a prospect carries the source it came from, what qualifies as backing, and what happens to a statement that has none. |
| Finding the right person | How a role at a prospect is inferred from public material, why it is recorded as an inference, and what that means for who a first message names. |
| First outreach | The first message to a prospect: what goes out, what is held and why, and what is written to the record in both cases. |
| From prospect to opportunity | When a researched prospect becomes a deal on the pipeline: what is created, what is linked rather than copied, and what deliberately stays behind. |
| Keeping prospect research fresh | Prospect research ages at different speeds. What is re-checked, what is left alone, and the control that stops re-research becoming a standing bill. |
| Location and scope | How a place in a discovery search is interpreted, what widening it actually costs, and why a tighter area usually returns more usable prospects. |
| Prospecting for the Owner and for a customer | Prospecting is one implementation serving two audiences. What is identical, what the plan bounds, and why a tenant sometimes sees a 403 instead. |
| Qualifying a prospect | How researched claims become a fit judgement and a score, what the score is allowed to decide on its own, and how a person overrides it. |
| Researching a candidate | What Connect reads about a candidate, what it extracts, and why text fetched from a stranger's website is treated as data rather than instruction. |
| Resolving a prospect to an existing relationship | The check that recognises a discovered organisation as somebody you already deal with, what it matches on, and what happens when it fires. |
| Sender readiness | The checks that stand between a written first message and a send: which mailbox, whether it is healthy, what allowance is left, and which signature applies. |
| Stopping a cold sequence | Every event that ends a cold outreach sequence, why each takes effect at once rather than at the next scheduled step, and how to confirm one stopped. |
| The angle for first contact | The opening line of a first message: how it is grounded in sourced claims, what it is refused permission to say, and what makes one read as automated. |
| The compliance check before outreach | Do-not-contact, suppression, unsubscribe, complaints and prior contact, all checked in one place before any outreach leaves a workspace. |
| The numbers above the list | What each headline number above the prospect list counts, and the paging defect that once made every one of them stop at five hundred. |
| The prospect record | Every part of a prospect record, which parts a person supplied, which came from research with a source attached, and which are recalculated. |
| Uploading your own list | Bringing a list you already own into Connect: the file, what is checked on every row, what happens to a row that fails, and what is never added. |
| What prospecting costs | Where prospecting spends money, how the cost router decides a deeper pass is worth running, and which screen shows what a run consumed. |
| Why this prospect | The sentence explaining why an organisation is on your list: what it may cite, what it is forbidden to say, and how to fix one that reads wrong. |
Questions#
Is prospecting available to a customer workspace, or only to the Owner?
Both, over the same implementation. A customer's use is bounded by their plan's allowances and the Owner's is not, but there is no Owner-only prospecting feature and no customer-only one. Prospecting for the Owner and for a customer covers the difference in wording between the two screens.
Why is my prospect list shorter than the one another tool produced?
Almost always because the other tool generated addresses and Connect did not. Compare the two lists on sourced addresses rather than on rows: the count that matters is how many you can write to without inventing anything, not how many lines the export has.
Does a prospect with no address get deleted?
No. It stays a researched prospect with a different next action — a call, a form, a person to find — and it keeps every piece of evidence gathered about it. Deleting it would mean paying for the same research again the next time the same brief runs.